


In (Slightly Less Than) All Honesty

by lunarlychallenged



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Past Abuse, Theon POV, and she has complete faith in him, in short its exactly what the show gave, ramsay bolton mentioned - Freeform, theon is just such a sucker for sansa, this is a whopper of a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 09:13:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18808165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarlychallenged/pseuds/lunarlychallenged
Summary: 'He hadn’t seen her in a year; not since she’d moved into the city to be with her boyfriend.  He’d sort of imagined calling her about a million times.  After all, they were the only two to have left Winterfell thus far, and wouldn’t it be nice for them to hang out sometimes?  Then he’d imagine her saying no, or accusing him of asking her out and laughing about it.  He wouldn’t call, and she didn’t call, and now it had been a year, and she was calling him at three in the morning.'





	In (Slightly Less Than) All Honesty

Theon was not the sort to answer the phone at three in the morning, regardless of whether he knew the number or not. He was not a doctor; he was not receiving calls about emergency patients and life or death situations. He was not a father, on the verge of panic anytime his child was out past ten o’clock.

He was just Theon, and he had no need to field drunk calls from mates or booty calls that he would have made himself if he was interested. He did not answer late calls, nor did he look at the phone when he got one. No point giving himself a taste of something if he knew it would taste bad.

For whatever reason, this time he decided to look. He’d gone home with some girl from the bar—nameless, ultimately faceless, but with a flower tattoo spreading across the ribs on her left side that made him burn from the inside out—and was just getting home, leaving a trail of clothes to pick up in the next day or three. Shoes off, shirt tossed away, belt undone and pants around his ankles, nearly to his bedroom. His phone vibrated, and he was so ready to toss it away. So, so ready, but he decided to look anyway.

_Sansa Stark_

He was rarely perfectly honest, but if he were, he would have to admit that he almost didn’t answer. He stared at the stupid contact photo: a picture of her in mid-sentence, face grotesquely contorted as she spoke. He’d only picked it because she flipped out about it when she saw the picture a year earlier.

A year.

He hadn’t seen her in a year; not since she’d moved into the city to be with her boyfriend. He’d sort of imagined calling her about a million times. After all, they were the only two to have left Winterfell thus far, and wouldn’t it be nice for them to hang out sometimes? Then he’d imagine her saying no, or accusing him of asking her out and laughing about it. He wouldn’t call, and she didn’t call, and now it had been a year, and she was calling him at three in the morning.

Robb was dead. Or Ned, or Arya, or anybody at all, and he was going to lose his mind.

He stared at the phone, and Sansa’s stupid face, and for a split second he imagined not answering. He could go to bed, and all of the Starks would be okay. He could get up in the morning, not look at his phone, and go to his shift at the bar without ever finding out why she needed to call him.

Then it occurred to him that she would be sent to voicemail in a second, and he answered the phone.

“Oh,” she whispered, surprised. “You answered.”

“You called,” he said, every bit as surprised as her. Then, clearing the emotion out of his voice, “you should know that people usually start with a ‘you awake?’ text before they get to the sexy stuff.”

She didn’t laugh, or huff, or anything. Was someone actually dead?

“Sansa. What’s going on?”

“I really messed up,” she said, voice muffled.

There was no pause before he responded. “Where are you? I'm already on my way.”

 

 

When Theon left Winterfell at the ripe old age of twenty-three, it was with a spectacular party to see him off.

The Starks, while not known for their parties, were known for an undying love for their friends. When those friends gathered, how could that kind of love and happiness not result in a night to remember? Nobody got blackout drunk. Nobody was caught screwing an old friend or cheating on a partner. Nobody got in a fight. For reasons Theon could never have expressed to his school friends, he was ridiculously happy.

(And maybe that was because his school friends could not make him feel anything more than an adrenaline rush, but he chalked that up to booze he consumed before ever meeting up with them.)

They played Cards Against Humanity, and everybody laughed. They drank every time Arya made somebody blush, and they drank every time Bran said something that killed a conversation; people got pleasantly tipsy in no time at all. They danced to old songs from the 2000s, breaking out dance moves that were fun and unsexy and everything that he felt ought to be shared with old friends.

(And maybe Sansa did make the Wobble look unfairly sexy, but he chalked that up to the wine.)

People told their favorite Theon stories—do you remember the time he broke his front tooth playing Red Rover; the time he convinced Rickon that he would explode because the boy had eaten Mentos after drinking Coke; the time he kissed Sansa on the cheek on New Years and had to kiss Robb’s cheek afterwards to make people stop looking at him; the time he drank too much before a final exam and had to take it drunk—and everybody smiled at him as though they hadn’t been bothered by the content while the stories were still in the making.

(And maybe a few of them looked sad, like they were going to miss him, but that was another thing he could chalk up to the alcohol.)

“I don’t know how you expect me to get through another year of school without you,” Sansa said, mixing him a screwdriver.

“Madness,” he agreed, grabbing her hand to keep the vodka pouring when she tried to stop the stream. “That’s why I don’t expect it. I expect phone calls and weekend visits.”

She sipped his drink, grinning when he frowned at her, but gagged. “Jesus, how can you drink it with this much vodka? You might as well drink it straight.”

He grabbed the glass and tossed it back, finishing it in one, two, three swallows. The burn coated his tongue and throat, and he shivered. “You make a good drink, love.”

She scowled, but he could see the underlying smile. She didn’t like being called love, never had. She didn’t like to be called honey, sweetheart, babe—anything that was said by someone in a patronizing tone was not to be attributed to the Stark girls. With that in mind, Theon called both of them absolutely everything that he knew would make their skin crawl, always in a sugary, tolerant voice.

“You could stay, _sweets_ ,” she said, sneering the last word.

He was halfway through a bark of laughter when he realized what she said. “What?”

“You could stay. I know that King’s Landing has more opportunities, or whatever, but you’ve got opportunities here.”

He was not so sure that he did. Small communities like theirs did not always forgive the rebellious youth, and he still hankered to _live._ To experience new things, new people, new everything. That could not happen here.

She poured herself a drink this time, barely wetting the juice with alcohol. “You’ve got people here.”

He was absolutely sure that he did. That was clear enough then, with the turnout at the party and Sansa drinking with him in a corner. There were only minutes to spare before Robb or Jon came to sweep him somewhere else, or Rickon asked him to play some game, or a girl started trying to catch him eye. Sansa had his eye now, and he could hardly look away.

“I do,” he said. “But for how long?”

She frowned, that wrinkle between her eyes deepening. “For always. Why wouldn’t you?”

“You’re in school now, but not always,” he said, half-grimacing. “A year from now, you’ll finish school and get a life. I’ll want someone to refuse to sneak out with me, and there will be nobody there.  
You’ll find new someones to not sneak out with.”

Maybe he was drinking too much. He sound pitiful.

She snorted, but it sounded a little watery. “Nobody could ever fail to make me sneak out as spectacularly as you do.”

It was not a sweet statement, but he was touched nonetheless. “Thanks, babe.” No condescension this time.

Her gaze snapped over his shoulder, and he assumed that one of the others had found them. She leaned forward and let her lips graze his cheek, just a passing brush of contact, and his breath caught.

She must have heard it, because she grinned at him. “The offer stands. You always have a home with the Starks.”

“Mine too,” he said, a little strangled. When she frowned, “to come to the city, I mean. Even if I end up in the worst flat of all time.”

Then Theon was gone, looking for something new in King’s Landing, and the old did not come to visit a single time. The old found a boyfriend to go out with, no sneaking required. The old graduated college and came to the city, but seemed to be looking for something new too. Theon threw himself so thoroughly into the new that he (almost) never had time to think about (miss) the old.

 

 

She was at home. Not Winterfell home, where her problem might be that she’d spilled wine all over an antique rug and needed him to help clean it up, or she wanted him to burn down the house to hide the crime. She was at the apartment she shared with Ramsay Bolton, and he had no idea what problem would require his help after all this time.

It was a nice complex, all things considered. Nice for a girl who had just graduated college when she got it. Nice for a girl who hadn’t gotten her Forever Job yet. Nice compared to his one bedroom, perpetually messy apartment in a complex with people who were either criminals or hiding from criminals.

(He liked to let people guess which one he was.)

He pulled into the parking lot and took a deep drag of his cigarette, wondering if he should knock on the door or wait for her. His heart nearly stopped when somebody leapt from the bushes and darted at his car. Sansa’s palms landed on the window of the passenger side, overnight bag resting on her elbow. She flung open the door and dove in, eerily reminiscent of games of hide-and-go-seek-tag in her neighborhood.

“Drive,” she demanded, door still open and seatbelt unfastened.

“H’lo to you too, bud.”

“Drive, Theon.”

“I am having a wonderful evening. Morning, rather.”

“Theon, if you don’t drive as though our lives depend on it, our lives may very well depend on it,” she snarled, grabbing his wrist and squeezing it like she would a dying tube of toothpaste.

He punched the gas, more afraid of her affect on his life than whatever it was she was running from.

 

 

When Sansa left Winterfell at the ripe old age of twenty-two, Theon heard about it during a phone call with Robb.

“We’ve never even met her boyfriend,” the Stark fumed. “We’ve seen pictures, but he’s never come ‘round before, and now she wants to move in with him? They’ve only been together for six months. _Six months_ , Theon.”

He made an absent sound of agreement, paging through the newest National Geographic. He kept them in a box under his bed so guests wouldn’t see them. “I’ve had dishes in the sink longer than that.”

“That’s exactly—actually, let’s come back to that—but that’s what I mean,” Robb said, frustrated. “She didn’t give us any notice. She didn’t tell us until she asked Mum if she could take Lady with her.”

That gave Theon a pause. Take Lady from Winterfell? “Did she say yes?”

Robb scoffed. “No. But Mum and Dad freaked out. You wouldn’t believe it. You remember Dad’s sigh? The big one?”

Did he ever. He’d heard it on a million occasions, if not more. He’d almost liked it, in a strange way. He liked to think that he wouldn’t be given a Dad Sigh if he wasn’t an honorary Stark. Dad Sighs are for sons and daughters, so Theon could pretend to be a son.

“Multiply it by a million,” Robb said.

“It was actually every Dad Sigh Ned never had to give her,” Theon replied. “She got by easy when we were kids. This is the build up.”

“You don’t seem properly horrified. Sansa Stark, good girl extraordinaire, is moving in with her mysterious boyfriend in a faraway land, without having discussed it with our family. She’s practically running away. She might not even have told us if she didn’t want the dog.”

“Sure,” Theon hummed. “Sure, sure.” He was looking at an article about a newly discovered fish in the deep deep downs of the ocean. He dogeared the page. “Look, bro, I live in King’s Landing. If she needs anything, she can just call me. I’ll keep an eye out. I’ll be the Ned 2.0.”

“She’s doomed,” Robb sighed.

Robb was right. Theon did not keep an eye out. He waited for her to call, or message him on Facebook. He waited for her to announce that she’d broken up with Mystery Man, or to at least drop a hint on social media that she wanted somebody else to talk to. He waited for a sign that his presence was welcome, and nothing ever came.

 

 

He was about ninety percent sure that it wasn’t drugs, but the number dropped with each minute in the car.

The first thing he’d thought was the she had lost a great deal of weight. Then, no, maybe not lost weight. It was more like she had started to wither and waste, like a flower on the verge of dying. Skin was pulled tight in some places, looking very much like it would split at the slightest movement, and it sagged some in others. She looked like somebody who knew what it was to actively suffer.

(She had never exactly been a kindred spirit when they were children, but he was seeing an awful lot of himself in her now. It was not gratifying in the slightest.)

Theon wished it was drugs. He wished that she was hooked on drugs, because he could take her to his place to work through withdrawls. He could take to a hospital, a rehab center, back to Winterfell. He knew a thing or five about drugs, but he did not know what to do about girls who hid in the bushes outside their apartments. He did not know what to do when he did know that people in happy relationships don’t have to hide outside; when he knew that people in safe relationships are not afraid for their lives.

He knew a things or five about abusive relationships, but he did not know a single thing about healthy coping mechanisms. All he had done was run to the Starks and let them carefully take care of the physical and emotional damage. They gave him room to heal, and then they gave him room to grow.

Maybe he knew a thing to do, after all.

“My place is about twenty minutes away,” he said, “unless there was somewhere else you wanted to go.”

“No.” Her hands grasped the bag until her knuckles went white. “Yours is fine.”

Though she did not look the way she had a year prior, seeing her let his heart settle down. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but her call had sent him into a panic. He had only waited to go to her long enough to get his pants back up—no belt, no shirt, no shoes. He hadn’t known if there was time for real clothes, so he hadn’t bothered. He hadn’t bothered with speed limits or red lights. He was the king of not bothering, but this bloody well made him the emperor.

“Hungry?”

“No. Yes. Are you?”

He was not hungry. He was a bit nauseous, in all (some) honesty. “I absolutely am. What’re you feeling?”

She was feeling sugar and grease. She was feeling french fries that she would insist she would not dip into her milkshake, but that she would always end up dipping anyway. She was feeling whipped cream as high as it would go, and dropping the cherry in Theon’s cup even though she could just as easily have asked the drive-through lady not to give her a cherry.

She hadn’t given him a cherry since he was still at uni. He felt twenty-two again; twenty-five was not much older, but he was much different now. Or maybe not.

“I don’t have any money on me,” she said, swiping a finger through the cream and sighing. “I’ll pay you back when I can.”

“I don’t take Stark money,” he said. “Never have before. Never will.”

He accepted Stark charity, of course—he’d accepted permission slip signatures, food, hand-me-downs, and as many minutes as they would give him. But never money, and certainly never Sansa’s.

“I don’t have a lot of things,” she said, voice small. All of her was small, hunching over in her seat in a sorry attempt to disappear entirely. He felt like he didn’t know her at all.

“Then I suppose we’re lucky that I have enough for two. Or one and a half. Either way,” he said, dragging his own finger through her whipped cream. She made a sound of protest, but didn’t pull the cup away. “What’s mine is yours.”

 

 

He nearly called Robb the second he closed the door to his apartment, turning to see her perched on the edge of his couch. It was the first time he really got a proper look at her, unencumbered by streetlights or the need to at least pretend to follow the rules of the road.

He wasn’t sure if it was possible for a ghost to badly reanimate its own body, but he was a believer now.

It wasn’t just her face, like he’d noticed in the car. It was the way she held herself, like she didn’t know where she fit. It was the way she wouldn’t meet it his eyes. It was the fact that he didn’t feel like he knew this person, and he didn’t know if she would survive him saying so.

This was Sansa, but this was not a Stark.

“Oh my God,” he said. Then, when nothing else came out, “oh my _God_.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, jutting out her jaw like a bulldog.

Neither did he. Good God, there was nothing he would rather do than spend the rest of his life pretending that this was still the girl who made posters to hold at his swim meets when she found out that his family seldom came to see him, the girl who knitted scarfs for her friends when she couldn’t sleep, the girl who would never call him in the middle of the night because she would never find herself in a situation that left Theon Greyjoy as the one person who she wasn’t afraid to face.

This was not that girl.

This girl had cheekbones that might cut him if he touched them. This girl had eyes made of broken glass, but was not crying. This girl was afraid to go home, and it was up to him to decide if he ought to force her.

“Peter Parker didn’t want to go, but here we are,” he said. His voice was flat, no nonsense—one hundred percent his father.

“One question,” she said. “I’ll let you ask one question, and that’s it.”

_Did he rape you? Hit you? Are the bruises under your clothes, or under your skin? Does he know that you’re gone? Will he care? Are you in any danger here? Would he think to call your house? What are you going to do in the morning?_

Theon shifted his legs so one ankle was resting on the other knee and sighed. “If your father—” the kindest man, the most patient man, the man slowest to anger, the man quickest to forgive, the best of men “—knew what was happening, would Ramsay be alive right now?”

“No,” Sansa said, giving the most peculiar little laugh. “No, not a chance.”

“Okay,” Theon sighed. He stood, looking between the couch and his bedroom thoughtfully. “Okay, listen. My room is trashed. Like, you’ll-swear-off-sex-with-me-forever trashed. But if that doesn’t bother you, you’re free to—”

“I’m pretty sure I did that when I was thirteen, so,” she said, the edges of her lips ticking up in a way that looked entirely painful and entirely unassuring. “Just for tonight, okay? I don’t want to be—it’ll be like I’m not even here, I promise.”

 

 

Her words were only a half truth, but that was alright. He traded in such truths, after all. Sansa did give him his room back after that first night. He didn’t bother going to bed at all; he’d have been getting up in a couple of hours anyway. He spent his morning trying to tidy up the place: he rummaged around to find all of the socks and other miscellaneous clothing that he’d abandoned between cushions or used as bookmarks when there were no scraps of paper in sight. He washed dishes and made a list of food he’d need if Sansa was going to stay for any length of time. He spent at least ten minutes with a finger hovering over Robb’s number on his phone, flipping between a certainty that he had to tell her family where she was and feeling obligated to keep her secrets.

They hadn’t spoken in a year. He was under no obligation to hide her—how long could people go without speaking whilst calling each other friends?

They hadn’t spoken in a year, and she had been distant from her family, too. If she left Theon’s place, she might drop off the map entirely.

Finally, rubbing a weary hand over his weary face, he turned his phone off. Again, he thought of all of the times he had considered calling her. Their distance was as much his fault as hers. If they weren’t friends anymore, that was his fault, too. Fixing it, then, was as much his responsibility.

He grabbed one of the good blankets from the closet and spread it over the couch for any future nights, and wrote Sansa a note.

_I’m off to the store. Do what you want. Eat what you want._

_Theon_

The funny thing about shopping for an old friend was that he only had the old memories to go on. He didn’t know what she would want for lunch, or if she liked drinking when she wasn’t out with friends. He didn’t know if there was a brand of anything that she liked over the others. All he knew was who she used to be, so he shopped for a girl who had lived years ago.

She used to like citrus scented deodorants, but not citrus shampoos (“It’s too light a scent for shampoo, Theon. I need something stronger, like flowers.”). She would sneak Twinkies in the middle of the night, and she would give Theon one every time he caught her in her kitchen with the box. She liked apples, but only if they had been peeled. She would eat marmalade on toast, but only if there was a thick layer of butter between the two.

He bought more for an overnight guest than he usually did for himself in a week, and it still didn’t seem like enough. He thought about texting her to ask if she needed a razor or something, but it seemed like too much. She had that overnight bag; maybe she’d thought ahead.

Or maybe she’d already be gone when he arrived.

For a half second upon getting home, he thought she actually had left. What was he going to do with the shampoo? Could it go in the dishwasher?

“Thank God,” she said, coming out of the bathroom. “I wanted to ask—can I use your deodorant? I forgot mine.”

He wordlessly held out a bag, and she looked in eagerly.

“Thank God,” she said with the sort of relief that made adventurers into heroes. “Theon, Aragorn could take lessons from you.”

He eyed her, a little confused. She seemed, well, okay. She seemed cheerful, productive, whole. Physically rough, but okay. “I tried my best to teach him everything I know, but some guys can only learn so much.”

She smiled at him, all with her mouth and nothing in her eyes. “We can’t all be Theon Greyjoy.”

“Thank goodness,” he agreed. “I’d never get laid if everybody had my skills. Listen, Sansa—”

“I’m off to shower,” she rushed. “I feel sort of slimy after staying up so late.”

She was in the bathroom before he could respond, but he knocked on the door. She didn’t answer.

“Sansa, we need to talk.”

Silence.

“I know that I said you didn’t need to tell me anything, but we need to figure out what’s happening.”

The shower turned on, too perfectly timed to be anything but a denial.

He sat down, back against the door. Deep breaths: in and out. In and out. In; give Sansa the time she needs to make a plan. Out; make it clear that there needs to be a plan.

He tried to project himself enough that she could hear, but that was difficult to do without angering the neighbors. He normally wouldn’t care, but there was an enormous biker next door who made the most incredible cookies. If Theon upset him, he might not get any on Saturdays anymore.

“If you want to stay here for a while, you can, but I need to know what you want from me,” he mumble-shouted. “Robb is my best friend; your family is mine. You don’t need to tell me everything, but I hate lying to them.”

He _hated_ lying to the Starks. He hated pride that he had not earned, and he hated seeing their disappointment when the truth inevitably came out. Theon hadn’t even known that he was capable of real love, big and selfless and beautifully painful, until he and Robb started at the same secondary school. These days, everything that he loved was somehow related to the Starks, all of it connected because of memories or an innate desire to tell one of them about it. He emailed Ned every week to talk about life. Catelyn sent him presents and necessities that he overlooked on birthdays. The children were his peers and friends, his nemeses and his companions. He loved, he loved, he loved them, and he had no idea how to act in a situation where what was best for one may not be what was best for all.

After what felt like a lifetime, the door shifted a little. He thought for a second that she was opening it, leaving him to sprawl on the floor, but she was sinking down to lean against the other side. 

“Ramsay wasn’t a good boyfriend,” she whisper-shouted back.

“Presumably not.”

“He wasn’t a good man.”

“Noted.”

“That’s all I want to say about him,” she said.

He smiled, bitter and joyless. “That’s more than enough.”

“Mum and Robb said that I shouldn’t move in with somebody I hardly know; somebody they hardly know. They said that I was making a mistake, and I said some terrible things. Worse still to Dad when he tried to give me a talk about men and marriage and all of that.”

Theon could nearly imagine it: Sansa shrieking at them about being a grown woman capable of making her own decisions. Catelyn’s lips thinning, Robb’s eyes going wide and hurt. The lines on Ned’s face deepening from rivers into chasms. Arya and Bran listening around the corner, Rickon hiding in his room. Sansa storming off and storming out of their lives, ready to start fresh with somebody who had nothing to do with the Starks.

“I said _terrible_ things,” she said again.

“They’ll forgive you,” he said. He would know. If there was a limit to the patience or forgiveness of her family, he would have hit it years ago.

“I just can’t face them,” she murmured. He distantly wondered if she had used the shower at all. His water bill would be through the roof, especially if she decided to stay. “I don’t know how to tell them that they were right, that I was wrong, that I failed.”

He laughed then. “Just like that, love. Exactly like that.”

“I was supposed to be perfect.” Perfect Sansa Stark, with perfect red hair in perfect little braids. Perfect grades with perfect notes from teachers. A perfect desire to design clothing, with a perfect ability to design lovely things. “What'll Mum and Dad say?”

“That Jon is daft. That Arya has the empathy of an old boot. That Bran is disobedient. That Rickon doesn't think for himself. That we can't all be Robb. That you are perfect for us.” Of course he included himself in the mix. Where else would he belong?

The door shifted again and opened, barely giving him time to shift his weight away from it. He looked at Sansa, back in her clothes from the night before, hair dripping wet, and waited for her to say something.

“I’d like to stay,” she said. Again, she sounded like herself. Her voice was right, her mouth sat right, her words were right. Her eyes were empty, which served as reason enough for him to let her stay. His eyes always shone brightly; he could afford to inject the light back into hers. “Not forever—just until I figure out how to go home.”

“I told you when I moved here,” he grinned, leaning back on his palms. “You’re always welcome.”

 

 

The partial lie Sansa told him that first night was that he would hardly notice she was there. He noticed every single thing. He noticed the new, admittedly better smells in his bathroom. She cooked sometimes, always making enough for there to be leftovers if he didn’t get home from work until the early hours of the morning.

“I don’t know how you’ve lived like this,” she said, dismayed, after a week of staying with him. “Didn’t you learn anything from us? You spent enough time with us for it.”

“Sure,” he said, diligently watching her put all shirts with sweat stains into a mixture of vinegar and water. “But I don’t have anybody to impress here.”

“What,” she crooned, “do you not bring your Tinder dates back here?”

He snorted. “As if I would let would-be stalkers know my address. As if I would risk playing host to girls who don’t know to leave before morning.”

The fact was, he liked bachelorhood. He liked living in a pigsty of his own creation, and he liked that he only had to clean whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He ate what he wanted. He had nobody to show off for—he hadn’t before, at least. It may have been too late to impress Sansa, but he wanted to nonetheless.

“This is still better than your father’s house; I’ll give you that.”

Sansa had only come to his house the one time: he was eighteen to her seventeen, and he and Robb had gotten into some big row over some stupid thing or other. They weren’t codependent, per se, but neither of them had needed to function without the other in many years.

The boys had moped around in their respective houses, and Sansa was fed up. She’d shown up on his front porch, set on making them make up, and Balon Greyjoy had answered the door. Mean Balon, with his permanently grey skin and sneer etched into the lines of his face. Strong Balon, with his fists that could break skin and bone and splinter wood. Hypocritical Balon, with his inability to stay faithful to his wife and expectations that she remain faithful to him.

Balon smiled at Sansa, eyes flicking up and down her form. “You must be one of the Starks.”

Theon, having heard her car pull up—she needed to get her brake pads fixed, but never listened to him; she probably couldn’t hear his suggestions over the sound of her brakes lurching and grinding—anxiously waited behind his father for a chance to drag her into his house and back to his room.

“Oh?” She’d looked back at Theon, seeming to realize that she had made a mistake in coming here. There was a reason he always went to them. “How can you tell?”

“You smell like money, and money stays away from Theon,” Balon said.

Beautiful Sansa, with porcelain skin and hair like a sunrise, smiled. Brave Sansa, with her heart of iron and more salt running through her veins than Theon had ever had, looked Balon in the eye. Then foolish Sansa, who had only ever behaved rashly on someone else’s behalf, said: “He’s not the only one money stays away from.”

Balon smiled again, but all good humor was gone. “Definitely a Stark. I can hear the ocean through the hollow of your head.”

Sansa looked over Balon’s shoulder at Theon, and he was filled with a rare flash of shame. She could see the peeling wallpaper behind him, the water damage in the corners. She could smell the rot of the porch and the residue of something spoiling in the kitchen. She could hear the creaking of floorboards when he pushed under his father’s arm and rushed out onto the porch. She could hear the cruelty in his father’s voice as Theon dragged her back to the car, shouting jeers about running away and letting a girl drag him by his cock when she had no intention of doing anything else with it.

The Starks knew, on some level or another, what Theon’s home was like. He’d never thought that any of them would see it, so he’d never bothered to let them see his shame of it. Shame and longing, all mixing into a lump in Theon’s throat.

Sansa had tried to fix it then by pretending not to have noticed anything. This Sansa, in a different but still lousy home, didn’t bother pretending.

“Everything is better than my father’s house,” he said.

“And it has a sort of trash chique.”

He laughed. “Emphasis on the trash, yeah?”

“I’ll provide the chique,” she promised, grinning back. It made sense that she was willing to mention his father now. She had a shame of her own, so acknowledging his was no great offense.

 

 

When Theon first told Ned about getting a job as a bartender, the man had laughed. “I can see it. Good for you to use that desire for a good time to give one to somebody else.”

Theon had grinned, a little proud in spite of himself. “Not give; sell. If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”

It was a Joker quote, but it worked well enough.

He liked working there, even two years later. He liked late nights and sleeping in. He liked mixing drinks. He liked his coworkers and flirting women out of their money. He liked the loud music and the smell of smoke and sweat and booze. He liked sinking into his role there, but it all came crashing down around him the first time Sansa walked in.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she said, looking at the borderline indecent pictures on the wall and the old jukebox.

He reapplied his public service smile. “What can I get you?”

She rested her chin in one hand, propping the elbow on the sort of sticky counter. He wished he’d wiped down that spot before she walked in, standing out in one of the sundresses she had shoved in her bag before leaving The Boyfriend’s Apartment. “Do you do screwdrivers?”

He grinned. “I certainly could.”

She told him about her day while she watched him pour, giving a quick nod when she wanted him to stop with the vodka. Lightweight. 

“And then,” she said, finger tracing the rim of the glass, “I had a job interview.”

He nearly dropped the lime wedge directly into the cosmo he was making for a man who looked manlier than the average person to order the drink and leveled Theon with harsh eyes that encouraged him to _say something just try to say something_. “What? Since when have you been looking for a job?”

“Since the day after I moved in,” she said, grinning sheepishly at her napkin.

“We agreed that you were supposed to use this time to feel better!”

“I feel fine,” she argued. “Totally fine. You’re the one acting as though I need protecting. I want a job. That’s my way of moving on, Theon. Actually putting my life back together.”

They both pointedly ignored the fact that she hadn’t told her family about the Psychoprat yet. Just a few days earlier, she’d told Catelyn over the phone that things were going swimmingly. On the phone with Robb the morning before, chatting about going in together on a set of china for Catelyn’s birthday, Robb heard Sansa say something to Theon.

“Is that Sansa?” Robb’s surprise had come through the phone in spades, and Sansa had grimaced. She waved emphatically, eyes widening as she shook her head.

“Ah—yeah, it is,” he said, ignoring the daggers in Sansa’s eyes. “Her washer broke, so she’s over using mine.”

“I didn’t know you guys talked.”

“We didn’t,” he said. “Got back in touch recently. I hadn’t even noticed that I was homesick until she showed up.”

That little admission of weakness, of nostalgia, was enough to set Robb’s mind at ease. Of course Theon missed his second family, the only family that mattered. Of course he and Sansa reconnected at a result. Of course it was wonderful; they didn’t need to worry as much about Sansa if Theon had an eye out. Theon was self-destructive, but would never risk Sansa.

So no, Sansa was not successfully moving on. He wanted her to feel better, but most of her bad feelings had more to do with telling her family than Ramsay. Ramsay was terrible, but she was almost entirely lacking a support system to help her move past him. Almost.

He sighed. “If you were hoping to hide from The Monster at the End of this Book, this isn’t going to help.”

“He should really be hiding from me,” she said, lips thin. She looked like her mother.

“That’s a good way to look at things,” Theon said, grinning in spite of himself. “Well said. Alright, then, get yourself a job.”

She beamed then, and he was blinded by it. “I already did. Sort of—the paperwork still has to go through, and it’s really just a job to get by until I can find my Forever Job, but still—”

He swore, grabbing her cup to make her another drink. “Of course you got the first job that interviewed. You Starks, with the world at your bloody fingertips—”

“It’s just a tailoring job at one of the bridal boutiques in town,” she protested, laughing. “It’s hardly Parliament.”

“You’ll fix one dress, and everybody will be hankering for you to do theirs. One thing will lead to another, and you’ll have your own shop.”

“That’s the dream,” she said, and there was real joy on her face. Real joy, dancing in her eyes and exploding from her lips and making his toes curl in his trainers. “I should probably get home—” _home_ “—and look up sewing supplies online. I left all of my things at the apartment, so I need to restock.”

Something about that rubbed him the wrong way, but he pushed it aside to unpack later.

Sansa pulled out her purse, ready to part with money she had been carefully saving. She didn’t need to save it as diligently, now. 

He yanked her glass away and shook his head. “Already paid for.”

“What?”

“By the handsome gentleman over there,” he said, pointing to himself. “He’s been watching you since you walked in.”

Sansa laughed. “My goodness, what a kind gesture. I wonder if he would have done if he knew that I was going back to the flat I share with another man.”

“Kinky,” Theon said, winking.

She laughed again, and he wondered if she knew that her natural disaster of a laugh left a wreckage in his chest. He certainly hadn’t, not until she walked into his second home and made it even better.

 

 

It hadn’t taken much unpacking to figure out what bothered him about her words: all of her stuff was in an abusive nutjob’s apartment. Clothes, makeup, her sewing machine and accompanying goods, pictures of her family, books—everything that Sansa had accumulated to make herself a home, lost.

He crouched on the arm of the couch, long legs bent awkwardly. “Sansa.”

She’d been sleeping, which made sense, it being four in the morning.

“Sansa,” he cooed, reaching two fingers down to wiggle her toes. “Sansa Stark.”

He gave her big toe a hard tug, and her legs jerked back. She sat up, eyes wild, and looked ready to smack him when he grinned.

“Sometimes I think you’ve grown up,” she hissed, “and then I realize that one has to go through puberty to grow up.”

His grin widened. “Good morning to you too, my love. If you would just pay attention to me, you would never need to realize anything about me.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Middle of the morning, more like,” he said, showing her the clock on his phone. “And you should be paying attention to me all the time. I’m a very interesting person.”

She rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Not interesting enough for this. What do you want?”

He grinned down at her, feeling like an avenging angel (and looking like a frog perched on a rock). “I want to break into Douche-Central’s apartment.”

She had eyes a little wild, a little manic, from being woken up in the dead of night by a man, looming over her, tugging on her toes. When he thought of it like that, he could understand her reaction. At his words, her eyebrows rose. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not. You’ve still got a key, yeah? You know his schedule. We go in when he’s gone, take your things, spray paint penises on all available services, and dip out. Go all Ocean’s Eleven on his small dick.”

Sansa fought back a smile, but it was a distant action. Her eyes were far away, calculating. “He may have changed the locks.”

“Or he might not have done.”

She was failing to bite back the smile. “We’ll just check to see if the key works. No hijinks. I don’t want you getting into trouble over me.”

“We’ll just check the key,” he agreed.

 

 

It still fit.

“He’s an idiot,” Theon said, awed. “A right idiot.”

She shrugged, pushing the door all the way open. “Must be my type,” she said, looking at Theon while he spat in one of the clean coffee mugs in a cupboard.

He shrugged. “These are mild hijinks.”

The weird thing about being in the apartment was that it didn’t feel like hell. It didn’t feel like a place where Sansa had been abused in some way. It felt like a home, even if it didn’t reflect who was actually living there.

“Let’s take everything,” he said suddenly, looking at wall art and photos and throw pillows.

“What?” She already held a blanket that Catelyn had knitted. “We don’t have room for everything.”

“Everything we can, then,” he said. “Don’t leave him anything you like.”

So they took everything they could. Blankets, pillows, pictures. All of her clothes. CDs, books, posters. Her sewing machine, which she held like it was her child. She wrote him a quick note, then said that they were ready go.

_I’ve taken what’s mine. We’re finished. If you go to the police, I’ll tell them what you did._

_Sansa_

Theon looked at the note and frowned. _P.S.,_ he wrote, _it’s not me, scumbag. It’s you._

Every Christmas, the Starks and Stark-types would crowd into the family room to watch the cartoon version of The Grinch. Ned and Catelyn had their own chairs, but the kids would squeeze like sardines onto the couch. Legs overlapped, heads rested on shoulders, and bowls of popcorn were passed and spilled. The experience of watching the show was more important than the content of the show, but Theon still found himself watching it every year for nostalgia’s sake. 

He thought of the Christmas special when he looked around the apartment one more time, feeling like he and Sansa were stealing Christmas. He laughed, one joyous bark, and Sansa grinned back.

“This is it,” she said. “This is the end of an era.”

“We could always just call the police,” he said. The statement was a formality. If she said yes, it would mean that he was wrong about her in every way. “Put the stuff back and send him to jail.”

“Men like Ramsay don’t go to jail,” she said. “They get probation and a stern talking to. That isn’t justice.”

“We make our own justice,” he said.

He filled the dishwasher with dishsoap—he drizzled it over the individual dishes, not sure if it would make more bubbles, but hoping it would— and set it running. He left the apartment, flipping the living room off for good measure, and congratulated himself on leaving with the moral high ground.

 

 

_Sansa: Can I read the books you keep in your closet?_

_Theon: i dont keep books in my closet_

_Sansa: I didn’t know you liked Pride and Prejudice._

_Theon: i dont even know what that is_

_Sansa: It’s my favorite. I used to read it over and over again._

_Theon: that clearly has nothing to do with this, since that clearly is not my book_

 

 

He frowned at the piles of bills she’d spread out on the table. “What’re you doing?”

“Figuring out how much I’ll owe every month.”

There was something impossibly lovely about the sight of it: Sansa’s hair pulled back in a ponytail, pencil tucked behind her ear. Sansa in one of his button-down shirts with it loosely buttoned over one of her tank tops.

(“If I’m doing the laundry, I’ll wear what’s clean. If you don’t want me in your clothes, wash them yourself.”)

Even so, he frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I have a job,” she said, shooting him a look that said he ought to know what she meant, thank-you-very-much. “It’s high time I started paying rent.”

“I don’t want your money,” he said.

“It’s not for you. It’s for the landlord.”

“I can handle rent myself, Sansa. Just—just do what you need to.”

She glared at him then, and he realized that what she’d heard was him calling her weak, or maybe just broken. “And I can handle my half of the rent, thanks.”

“You don’t have a room,” he said crossly. “You sleep on the couch. You’re a squatter, at best.”

She did that thing again, the one where she stuck out her jaw. “Fine. I won’t pay rent, then.”

So she did not pay rent. No, she went to the store to get groceries. She went to thrift shops to build up an extensive and eclectic collection of mugs; her favorite was shaped like the lense of a camera, while Theon liked the one that said “pot head.” She got a cup to hold their toothbrushes, and scrubbed all of the walls to get rid of any hints of dirt or mold. She bought candles that smelled like pumpkin spice or peppermint or salted caramel lattes. She did not pay rent, but she slowly turned his apartment into a place that felt both intensely homey and like it belonged to the both of them.

Maybe he should have accepted her money. When she left, which she eventually would, being there would probably break his heart.

 

 

It occurred to him, after two months of playing at roomies, that he had not slept with a single girl in all of that time. He would swipe through women on Tinder while he used the toilet or sat in the waiting room at the dentist. He would message them during commercial breaks on the TV. He’d even gone out with a girl or two, but he just left the coffee shop or bar with a promise to call and a brief peck on the cheek.

He hadn’t called.

He still wanted sex. God, did he ever want sex. But it was hard to see the appeal in one night stands when there was a girl at home. A girl who wore shorts while they watched movies together, stretching her legs out to rest over his. A girl who would be sleeping on the couch when he got home, ruffled and lovely. A girl who was never disappointed in him—irritated and baffled, yes, but never disappointed.

He was living a domestic life with a girl who was not sleeping with him, and he was okay with it.

“You’re being an idiot,” he told the mirror while he shaved. He liked looking as though he didn’t put any effort into his appearance, but there was a difference between having unruly facial hair and having a neck-beard. “Get back out there. There’s nothing permanent happening in here.”

How would he explain the situation to any other girl? ‘Yes, sorry, let’s walk past my gorgeous female roommate on the way to my room. Yes, I am mad horny all the time, but you’ll just have to accept that the way my heart speeds up around her is coincidental and nothing will ever happen.’

Fat chance.

Sansa knocked on the door to the bathroom. She always knocked. “I’m feeling Italian. How does spaghetti sound?”

“Like magic,” he said, and completely forgot that there was anything out there that he had ever wanted to get.

 

 

He regretted the domesticity about two weeks after that, when there was a knock at the door at eleven in the morning. Sansa was off at work, making pretty women even lovelier by making them the perfect dress. He hadn’t ordered takeout. It wasn’t a Saturday, so biker man next door shouldn’t have any cookies for him. In short, Theon was not expecting anybody, so he looked through the peephole.

Ned Stark stood on the other side, and Theon nearly had a heart attack.

“Oh my God,” Theon said, far too loud for the man outside not to hear.

“Not quite,” his not-father (almost-father, dream-father) said. “May I come in?”

Theon looked around. He saw wall art. He saw the blanket and pillows on the couch. He saw Sansa’s favorite snacks on the counter. In short, he was absolutely screwed.

“Absolutely,” he said, and threw open the door.

He embraced Ned. It was not an attempt to distract him from the apartment’s damning evidence of a Stark inhabitant, though he had tried similar things over the years. No, this hug was to take advantage of his right to one before Ned had a chance to decide that Theon was not deserving of hugs anymore.

“I’ve missed you,” Theon said.

“We’ve all missed you. Except, evidently, for one of us.”

And that was it. That was all Ned said about it. There was no cursing. There were no accusations about lies, and there was no telling Theon that he had betrayed their family. There was just this chance to explain, and Theon had never come so close to crying in front of Ned.

He told him everything. Every single thing, from Theon’s goodbye party to partying in the city, from Sansa’s horrid relationship to their tentative life here. He talked about getting jobs and putting soap in a dishwasher. He talked so much about lying, and about how hard it was not to say anything.

When had he become the sort of person to have trouble lying? Not just to the Starks, but in general?

Theon talked for hours about nothing, too, and Ned only listened. He wished, not for the first time, that he had been born into a family like the Starks. He wished for a father that listened to him, and he wished for siblings that stood up for one another instead of fighting for themselves. For the first time, that wish was not to be a Stark. If he was a Stark, Sansa would be his sister. For one thing, she would never have come to him with all of this. For another, the feelings he was having would never have been possible.

Finally, voice hoarse, he finished. He looked at Ned, and Ned looked back.

“I cannot believe you would keep this from us,” Ned finally said. He leaned back in his chair, giving the sort of sigh Theon imagined good fathers passed on to good sons when the sons were about to have children of their own. The Disappointed Dad Sigh. “We trusted you to come to us if something happened.”

“I wanted to,” he admitted. “I think I made the right choice.”

“Oh?”

“She would have left if she thought I would tell you. I swear, she would have done. I decided that it was better to have her here in secret than out God knows where, doing God knows what.”

Ned’s eyes tracked around the cramped apartment, catching on the sewing machine on the dining room table, the books on the arm of the couch, the curtains over the windows. “Maybe she was,” he said softly.

“That’s why I’d like you to consider letting her stay,” Theon said. Ned looked surprised, and he was too. He hadn’t dared to allow himself to even imagine Sansa staying in long term, not once other people knew about it. “I mean, I know it’s up to her, but I don’t think it would be so bad for her to stay.”

“Not so bad for her, or not so bad for you?”

Theon looked for disapproval on his pseudo-father’s face, but found none. “Yes,” he said, allowing himself to smile. “Yes, to at least one of those.”

 

 

He’d almost asked her out, once.

He had never seen the point when the people around him first started asking others. Before sex was a factor in relationships, couples were practically glorified friends. Even if Theon had fluttery feelings, feelings that made him imagine a future with Sansa—which he would never have admitted, mind, not under the threat of death or worse—there would be no point to asking her out. He got to see her in her home. He got to see her when he was with her brothers, and he got to see her alone when the others went off to do something else.

He got to see her, and that was enough.

But then prom came around, and Sansa was desperately hoping that one of the older boys would invite her to come.

“Margaery was asked weeks ago,” she lamented. “If Margaery gets to go, but I don’t, I’ll die. Honestly.”

For such a good liar, Sansa said honestly a lot.

So he imagined asking her. He imagined saving up for a good suit, a sharp suit, that would make her heart stop. He imagined his own breath catching when he saw her in her dress. He imagined Catelyn being really pleased with him for escorting her, but Ned seeing right through him. Robb and Arya would tease, but there would be no harm in it. If he was lucky—even his imagination could imagine this in only the most perfect scenarios—she would kiss him at the end of the night.

So he set money aside to buy flowers to give when he asked her. Flowers on their own were not expensive, but he would need to save for them in a way that did not make it immediately obvious that he was saving for something. He was thinking roses, or maybe lilies to be less cliche. 

More importantly, he started gathering his nerve. He started thickening his skin so a rejection would roll right off. He started smiling at Sansa more, rejoicing when she smiled back. 

One afternoon, a few weeks before the dance, he went to school with money heavying his pocket. He would go to a shop after school, buy some flowers, and ring the Stark doorbell. He would ask her properly, and she would be properly impressed. It wouldn’t matter that he was Theon Greyjoy, barely a step up from white trash. It wouldn’t matter that she had seen his house, and it wouldn’t matter that he wasn’t as handsome as some of the other boys in his year.

In the end, it wouldn’t matter that he had imagined anything. That very day, Sansa was asked by Harry Hardyng. She was delighted, entranced, infatuated. They didn’t stay together for long after, but he escorted her to the prom.

Theon spent his money on marijuana, and he spent the prom smoking it in his backyard. There were no suits and dresses, no lovely girls, no hopeful beginnings. There was just bitter smelling smoke and a bitter Theon, with nobody to blame but himself.

 

 

It had not occurred to Theon to ask how Ned knew Sansa was staying with him in the first place. Good dads had magical dad powers, he supposed, and that included an inner radar for the presence of their children. Ned had sensed that Sansa was in a different home, so he tracked her to Theon.

It was the first question Sansa asked when she got home from work, purse halfway down her bicep as she paused in slinging it off. Her face was steady, but her voice was small and breakable. There was that look in her eyes, the one that he had worked so hard to do away with.

Ned had the same look, so maybe that was okay.

“We wanted to fix things with you,” Ned told them. “Your mother thought we would get everybody together for a Christmas party.”

It had been a while since they had a Christmas party. It was a nice idea.

“I called Ramsay to invite him,” Ned said.

_Oh._

“We found out that you had not lived there in months. We found out that you had been lying to us for months. I came to find you, and I assumed that there was one person you would always go to for help, no matter what the problem was.”

He was so sure that he did not belong here for this, but Sansa had stretched her leg out to press her calf against him. Maybe it was to keep him there to be held accountable, but maybe she needed him there for emotional support. Maybe she took courage from this, and tried to give him some in return.

“You should have come home,” Ned said.

A tear slipped down Sansa’s cheek, and she looked at the wet spot it made on the table. “I know.”

“You could have come home.”

“I know,” she said.

Theon reached under the table to grab her hand. Ned could obviously tell, but Sansa gripped him like a lifeline. Her nails bit into his skin. Her skin was clammy. He held her even harder.

Ned leaned forward and let a hand ghost over her shoulder, hesitant. “But if you couldn’t come to us, I’m happy you came here.”

She huffed out a tear-soaked laugh. “Like you said, I could have come home. I did, just not to the home you expected.”

Theon shouldn’t be here. Theon would never, ever go anywhere else.

“Your mother is going to kill you,” her father said.

As always, Ned was right. Catelyn lost her mind, completely and utterly. She was angry about the man who did not deserve such a human title, and she was angry at herself for letting Sansa live with him.

(“She didn’t let me,” Sansa whispered to Theon, annoyed. “I practically escaped in the middle of the night.”)

Catelyn was terrifying. She was all jagged corners and rash decisions, a lot like Sansa was. 

(“I’m not like my mom. I swear, I’ll kill myself if I end up like her.”)

She threatened to bring Sansa home for good. She threatened to kill Theon if he did something wrong. She threatened, she threatened, she threatened, and Ned held her hand until she started to cry.

It wasn’t until then that Theon realized that nobody really talked about Sansa making a real decision to stay. Ned told her she was always welcome to go back to Winterfell. Catelyn told her to keep Theon in line. Sansa promised that the Christmas party was still on and that she would make Theon take a few vacation days so they could go.

Everybody assumed she was staying, and she did.

 

 

_Robb: wtf_

_Theon: she’s ok. promise_

_Robb: duh. id be there if she wasnt_

_Robb: you should have told me_

_Theon: this was the help she needed. it was all for her_

_Robb: duh. Thats how it always is with you_

_Theon: we good?_

_Robb: yeah_

 

 

“I’ve already talked to everybody else,” Sansa said, biting her lip.

“I know.”

“If I don’t call, that’s it. She’ll see that as a complete severance.”

“That’s Arya for you,” Theon said. If it was him making phone calls, he would have called Arya first. The boys would be pissed, would be relieved, would insist on seeing him soon. The Stark boys felt one emotion at a time, so he would know how to talk to them. Arya only ever felt one emotion: righteous indignation. She would be harder to talk down, so he would have gotten it out of the way. Sansa had waited until the very end, and she was half ready to just give up.

“She won’t understand,” Sansa said in a small, breakable voice. She had been fragile again lately, like when somebody asked an almost-okay person if they were okay. The not-okayness would immediately take over again. Sansa had almost been okay, and this was breaking her open. 

Theon didn’t think she could ever be okay, not until she made things right with her loved ones. She needed to make this call.

“And she never will, if you don’t give her a chance to try.”

“Stay,” Sansa said, and put the phone on speaker, letting the phone ring. They sat on opposite ends of the couch, facing each other with the phone in the middle. He felt like a thirteen year old boy playing with a Ouija board with his mates.

Arya picked up on the other end, but did not say a single word. She really was a ghost, but whether she was vengeful or loving was yet to be seen.

“Hey,” Sansa said.

Silence.

“Did Dad call?”

“Yes,” Arya said. She sounded tired.

Sansa shifted a little, leaning toward the phone. Her hair was pulled into a braid, small whisps escaping to make a glowing red halo. “So, you know about Ramsay.”

“That he was an abusive pig? Yeah, I know.” Arya’s end crackled with static for a second. “I also know that you’re living with Greyjoy. That’s bleak.”

Theon bit back a grin. He and Arya were two explosive peas in a pod.

“I thought Mom was going to die,” Arya continued. “But I don’t know which was worse to her: that you’re living with the boy who used to drink her wine and fill the bottles with water to hide the crime, or that you thought living with Bolton was better than coming back to us.” Her voice got lower with each word.

"You don't have to say it,” Sansa said. She held her head in her hands, but he reached over and took her hands in his own. Their arms made a circle around the phone, completing the electronic seance. “I already know."

Arya's voice, though warped by the phone, was thick. "Know what?"

"That I'm an idiot for staying. That someone smart would have left the second it even looked like it might get bad," Sansa said, a tear already sliding down her carefully blank face.

Arya laughed, a horribly sharp sound. "That wasn't what I was going to say at all."

"That I deserved it, if I didn't have the nerve to do anything about it," Sansa continued. "That it's on brand for me to be the one who let's men walk all over me."

"I was going to say that I'm sorry," Arya said. Sansa sucked in a shaky breath. "I was going to say that none of this would have happened if we had tried harder to talk to you after you left instead of cutting you off like a pissy ex. That a good sister would not have let you isolate yourself, and that I should have come for you months ago. That you shouldn't have been scared to come back to us, and that I should have been there to burn him to the ground.”

Arya was audibly crying by the end, and Theon had to press a hand over his mouth to keep from falling apart.

"I should have _been there_ ," Arya said again, and Sansa made a high, keening sound. “And I’m sorry that I didn’t make you feel like I loved—that I would be there for you.”

“I’m sorry too,” Sansa said. “For everything.”

“And I’m sorry that you feel so bad about yourself that suddenly Theon seems hot to you.”

Theon snorted, but Sansa laughed. “I know, right? How the mighty have fallen.”

He wanted to tease back, but his mental lexicon had reverted to that of six month old. Arya had practically accused Sansa of liking him, albeit in Arya’s harsh, unromantic way, and Sansa hadn’t denied it.

 

 

He decided to make her decision to stay into a little party. A two-person party. An intimate affair, complete with a lack of romance, a realization that the both of them needed to make more friends, and cupcakes.

Sansa’s jaw dropped when she saw the cupcakes on the table, each one bearing a different letter: W E L C O M E H O M E

“When did you have time to do this?”

He’d been working on it all night. The only way he could guarantee that they would see each other for any significant amount of time was by making them so they could eat dessert for breakfast. He got home from the bar, grabbed a box mix, and baked as silently as he could.

“Here and there,” he said instead, shrugging. “It’s no big deal.”

She shot him a look; _you baked_ , it said. _You couldn’t cook to save your life; you couldn’t bake to save my life_ , it said.

“It’s from a box,” he argued.

She shot him another look; _this was a selfless act_ , it said. _You seldom commit selfless acts_ , it said.

Theon sighed, reaching for the second ‘M.’ “Welcome hoe, Sansa.”

She laughed out loud and took a picture of the cupcakes without the M. She took the last ‘E’ and sighed when she took a bite. “You got the lemon.”

“Of course I got the lemon. How little do you think I know of you?”

The Smile was killing him. Girls did not ever, had never been expected to, look at Theon like that. He did not date. He didn’t even take girls out on dates, really. His dates were more like test drives to see if a girl was worth taking for a real ride. 

(“On my dick,” he’d elaborated when he used that analogy on Sansa.

“I’m shocked that you passed the test for any of them,” she replied.)

Anyway, girls didn’t Smile at Theon like that. He did not know what to do in return. Acknowledge the look? Do it back? Do something to ruin the mood?

He pulled out his phone and showed her an Amazon wishlist. “To make things official.”

She scrolled through. “These are all bunkbeds.”

“I don’t have a spare room, so this is the best I can do.”

He’d really thought that it would ruin the Smile on her face, or at least change it to a different sort of smile, but now she was laughing while she Smiled, and it was even worse. He was definitely doing it back. 

 

 

And so Christmas gave way to Valentine’s, to St. Patrick’s, to Easter.

Sansa changed her Amazon shipping address to Theon’s.

Theon started keeping blankets in his car for when she got cold after a night out.

Sansa started cleaning her hair out of the shower drain. Not until Theon decided to charge her a dollar each day she forgot, but still.

Theon started texting Bran about some girl the kid fancied, as though he had extensive experience in wooing women and keeping them after.

Sansa bought Theon a new suit for his birthday.

Theon kept his books out in the open, where Sansa could see them and read them and ask him what he thought of them.

Sansa came to the bar nearly every night, coming up with excuses to stay until closing and go home with him.

One afternoon, while the pair deep cleaned the apartment (“I can’t live in this squalor, and no, I couldn’t live like this yesterday either.”), Theon got a Tinder notification.

Blonde. Nice cheekbones. The faint outline of a nipple ring visible through her shirt. She’d sent him a simple “hey,” and Theon was a little baffled by it. He hadn’t looked at the app in ages.

“Everything good?” Sansa paused in dusting the TV, frowning at him.

“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You looked confused,” she said, shrugging. Then, with a grin that could have but through rocks, “someone must have asked you your thoughts on War and Peace.”

“Come off it,” he scoffed. “It was a big book. Anybody would be overwhelmed if they were asked what their general thoughts were.”

“‘I liked it. I got bored during the war bits. Natasha and Pierre should have gotten together earlier.’ It’s not hard.”

Oh, he wanted to argue his point. He wanted to make her do the same with Les Mis or The Odyssey. He wanted to drop his vacuum and set aside the afternoon to prove that she really didn’t give classic literature the respect it deserved, and—

Theon looked back at the girl and her message. This girl would have been exactly his type a few months prior. He would have mentally labelled her as a ‘text for an hour, screw for a night’ catch, and he would have been delighted at his luck. 

_sorry,_ he texted, _but i won't be up for anything tonight. or any other night. ive fallen in love with my flatmate_

He deleted the app, and there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that it was the right call.

“Nope,” he said, tossing the phone aside to give Sansa his undivided and, frankly, enraged attention. “Just a text from somebody I wasn’t expecting. Now, let’s throw down. The war bits were _not_ boring, and—”

 

 

“You can’t honestly have thought I’d sleep on your couch for the rest of my life,” she said, face a comical mixture of annoyance and amusement. “What, you thought we’d be in our forties, wrinkling and fattening up in this wasteland?”

It wasn’t a wasteland, not really. Not after six months of sharing it. Not after two people with steady incomes trying to fix it up. Not after two people having good days and bad days and making it their own.

“Well—sort of,” he blustered. “We’re roommates, and I didn’t know you were through with it.”

“We aren’t roommates,” she said, putting on a slow, low, dumb voice she always used when pretending to be Theon.

(“I don’t sound like that.”

“I don’t sound like that.”

“Yes! See? I sound nothing like that!”

“Yes! See? I sound—oi! I was going to wear this to work, you twat—oh, powdered sugar is so hard to wipe off—”)

“I’m a squatter, at best,” she finished.

He didn’t know how to argue with her. He was a champ at arguing for stupid causes, but this was beyond him. She had a job. She had made things right with her family, and she looked very much like the girl he thought she would have become if The Great Evil had never happened. It was time for her to move out, and he could not bear the idea of starting and ending days without seeing her.

“You could stay,” he said, voice a little reedy.

Sansa stopped teasing, then. She had been folding laundry, but she dropped the towel she’d been in the middle of folding. “Theon, I’m going to be honest: I have no idea what you want from me right now.”

_To stay. To read all of the books in the closet. To play board games on the living room floor. To spend evenings or mornings or lunch breaks together, so long as it was time together. To have a joint bank account, which seemed like the epitome of trust. To go to Winterfell together, really together. To be happy with the way things were, even if not everything was worth being happy about._

He sighed, long and deep. “I want for you to fall in love with me, I suppose.”

And there it was, out in the open. There was perfect honesty, and it probably wasn’t worth it. He wanted her to fall in love with him, and for everything else to be exactly the same.

“You want me to fall in love with you.” No inflection. No emotion. Just Sansa, looking at him with that blank stare that made his heart shrivel up.

“I mean, yeah,” he said.

“You want me to fall in love with you, and then what?”

“What do you mean, and then what?” He was angry now, and he knew it was stupid. It was stupid to be upset about a friend not loving him, and it was stupid for him to have said it like this in the first place. It was stupid, he was stupid, and Sansa really ought to just turn him down without toying with him. “And then you stay. And then you don’t sleep on the couch, ‘cause you’ll be sleeping with me. And then nobody needs to tell you you’re welcome at home or that I need to look after you, because it’s assumed that you _are_ home and that I’m _glad_ to look after you. And then we’re happy, Sansa, Christ—what do you mean, and then what?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, sucking in one cheek. “I’m moving out.”

Fine. Fine, she could move out. All things considered, she probably ought to now that everything was out in the open. Perfect honesty sucked balls.

“If that’s what you want,” he said, defeated. He’d just go back to not being bothered, and he’d be okay again next time he saw her. He wouldn’t see her again until he was okay, even if that was years from now.

“Because this place is the pits, and I won’t live here anymore.”

“Way to rub salt in the wound.”

“Which is why,” she said, finally smiling a little, “maybe you could come with me.”

He stared at her, truly not knowing what she was talking about.

“I can handle being in love with you, but I cannot handle staying here. Let’s compromise, and have you move in with me instead.” Sansa looked at him the same way she had at his going away party; a little fragile, but so brash that he almost doubted that she was putting emotions on the line.

“You can handle, or are currently handling?”

She waved her arms, dismissive. “Come on, Theon, would I really have stayed here this long if I didn’t love you?”

“I dunno.”

“Would I have called you if I wasn’t half there already?”

“I dunno.”

“Would I have asked you to stay in Winterfell if I didn’t have a legitimate reason to want you to stay?”

“I dunno,” he said, starting to smile back.

“My God, you’re thick,” she said, and then she was striding past the couch and throwing her arms around his shoulders. “Move in with me,” she said, and then she was kissing him.

It was better than Tinder dates. It was better than nameless, faceless girls with tattoos. It was better than something out of Pride and Prejudice, because this was _real._ This _mattered_.

Some of the appeal, maybe, came from knowing her. He may not have known that she liked it when he bit her lip, but he knew every curve of her lips. He may not have known how much tongue she liked, but he knew the landmarks of her mouth: the bicuspids that had been pulled when she had braces, the chipped bottom tooth from a too-rowdy chicken fight at the beach, the small scar on her lower lip from a biking accident. He knew not to muss up her hair, but that she would like having it touched. He knew her, and when she smiled against his lips, he knew to pull away and smile back.

“This is a good apartment,” he said, breathless. “A right catch.”

“It’s trash,” she argued, laughing a little.

“I like it here, and I love you.”

“You’ll like it somewhere else, too, because you love me.”

She was right, and she knew it.

“Say it back, and I’ll think about it,” he said.

“I like it here,” she said. He waited, head tilting. “And I love you.”

“There we go,” he said, pulling her back in.

 

 

It was Sansa’s first proper moving day, complete with too many family members trying (and mostly failing) to help. It was the first moving day done with ample planning and help, and it was the first moving day that had her parents’ full blessing.

“Those aren’t my books,” Theon said to a puffing Robb. “They’re Sansa’s.”

“Sansa doesn’t read National Geographic,” Robb replied. “Besides, Sansa already told me that you like Jane Austen.”

“Sansa’s a liar. She lied about living with me for months.”

Jon jogged past, rushing to get the door for Bran. “You lied about that too, Greyjoy.”

“That’s beside the point,” Theon insisted. Then, when Robb started putting the books onto their new bookshelf—a real shelf, for all of his things; picture that—“not like that, Stark, honestly. You have no eye for organization. And books are fragile—just give them here, actually, that’s it.”

To Robb’s everlasting credit, he did not laugh. He just moved over and watched Theon line up the books in alphabetical order by author. The two boys stood there, putting a life together, and it occurred to Theon that they may be brothers someday. They always had been, but to put the title to it would be a good thing.

“I can’t believe you’re moving in with my sister,” Robb sighed.

“Hell was bound to freeze over sooner or later.”

Robb shook his head, mock disappointment dripping from every word. “I mean, I would have thought both of you had better taste. You’re a prat, and Sansa’s so high maintenance. Both of you should be trying for something better.”

“It’s what makes us perfect for each other,” Sansa grunted, bringing in a new box.

Arya, out of sight but evidently within range: “They’re the only two people willing to deal with the other. Soulmates.”

Theon liked maintaining Sansa, and it seemed like she thought he was funnier than he was annoying. He looked at the Starks, his Starks, and was so, so happy. He was happier than he could ever remember being, even if Sansa had chosen an apartment with beige walls. Even if she insisted on new furniture. Even if his commute to work more than doubled.

Even if, because he had never felt so certain that this was it. _It._

He opened his mouth to say so: “You lot are prats, and you’d miss me terribly if I was gone.”

“Oh,” Arya crooned. “Oh, no, such a weak response from such a weak man.”

Robb laughed, tugging on Sansa’s ponytail. “And you chose him.”

“Yeah,” she said, that same happiness swelling in her voice, in her bright eyes, in the curve of her mouth. “Yeah, I absolutely did.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been trying to do a modern AU for a bazillion years, and I finally got inspired. Tragic deaths will do that, I guess.


End file.
